Glass artist picks up shards of broken dream and makes new life
Lisa Allen began working in glass after her career as an equestrienne was shattered.
“I lived in a very serious kind of household,” said Allen, 43. “My dad was sick for a lot of my childhood and there wasn’t a whole lot of creativity.”
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Her father, who had congestive heart failure for 10 years, was on oxygen. Horses were Allen’s escape; she trained polo ponies, showed horses and taught horseback riding.
Things changed in 1997. “I started having physical, neurological problems. Muscle weakness. Muscle twitching.”
Since she no longer could work with horses, Allen had to find something else to do.
“A lot of people are born knowing what they want to do. I thought I had been born knowing what I would do the rest of my life and then ‘boom!’ This thing happens and it totally shifts you in (another) direction.”
She began taking continuing education classes in pottery and stained glass at the University of Memphis. She worked in stained glass for about three years until she got bored. She then began studying with Memphis glass artist Jan Singer. “What I liked about her was her fearlessness about trying anything. It didn’t matter if it broke. It didn’t matter if it didn’t work.”
Allen learned how to fuse glass. She could meld glass in layers after melting it in a kiln at 1,500 degrees or so. “That was probably 2001. By 2002 I had turned the garage into a studio and bought three kilns and I was ready.”
She made “lots of whimsical little animals” until she attended a workshop conducted Sharon Gilbert at the Talisman studio in Chicago.
A technique Allen learned and never stopping using was “pattern bars.” She makes a “giant lasagna” slab of glass strips, which she heats in the kiln. She then slices the slab with a diamond blade and uses the colorful slices in glass trays, bowls and wall pieces. Larger one-of-a kind pieces are made of thicker glass.
The method of making some of her other pieces began as a fluke. “I had a bunch of scraps left over and I was feeling tired of the same old same old.”
She piled the glass scraps on a piece of metal mesh “just to see what would happen. I had a Jan Singer moment.”
The result was glass with dizzying color movement. She duplicated the process and made more pieces. “Everybody who looks at these things sees something different. It’s like a test: ‘I see an angel.’ ‘I see a frog.’ ‘I see a spider.’”
Allen recently began taking blacksmithing classes with Jim Masterson at the National Ornamental Metal Museum. “(I) love the idea of combining metal with glass,” she said, adding, “I love just getting filthy and hammering on things. It’s so cathartic.”
In January, Allen sent four pieces of her work to the owner of Kittrell/Riffkind Gallery in Dallas. “Within three days two of them had sold, one while they were unpacking it and the other while they were trying to hang it on the wall. And I was like, ‘This is the greatest thing ever.’”
Allen’s pieces can be found at T Clifton Gallery at 2571 Broad. Some of her trays will be featured in the gallery’s “Creative Art for a Cure” mixed media art event and reception benefiting those affected by polycystic kidney disease (PKD). The show opens Feb. 12.
“I’m just now having kind of success around the country, but I think it’s because (of) learning this new language after the language of horses. . . . It’s not easy to pick up this new language and learn it, so I’m just kind of making my way.”
Contact Michael Donahue at 529-2797 or e-mail donahue@commercialappeal.com.
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